The game has changed for Jack Grealish.
“In the last 18 months he’s had a full realisation of what people look at now — goals and assists,” Neil Taylor, who was Grealish’s team-mate at Aston Villa for the last four years, tells The Athletic.
“It got to a point that even in training he was scoring and scoring and scoring, and assisting and assisting and assisting. Before it was fantastic dribbles and he would be fouled. But he’s gone beyond that now. He realised that he could not just go by people but create chances and score goals, and he realised that he could do it against the best.”
That has played a large part in Manchester City making him the most expensive English player of all time, the Premier League’s record transfer. Those are big enough statements in their own right but remember, too, that City’s previous record transfers had hovered around the £50-£60 million mark.
If they’re spending £100 million then they are convinced they have a superstar on their hands, and that’s the level Taylor believes the 25-year-old has reached since Villa’s return to the Premier League in 2019.
“People have been saying to me, ‘£100 million, that’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’. I’ve no doubts at all, he’s easily worth that amount of money,” the Welshman adds. “I played most of my (international) career with Gareth Bale, he showed that he was good as a kid, even at 16 or 17.
